Did you know that on almost every day of the year, at least one member of the New York Yankee's all-time roster celebrates a birthday? The posts of the Pinstripe Birthday Blog celebrate those birthdays and offer personal recollections, career highlights, and trivia questions that will bring back memories and test your knowledge of the storied history of the Bronx Bombers.

Results tagged ‘ general manager ’

His full name is William Frederick Woodward and he was born in Miami, Florida on this date in 1942. After playing two years of college ball at Florida State he was drafted by the then Milwaukee Braves in 1963 and made his Major League debut that same September. He would spend the next eight seasons as mostly a utility middle infielder, first with the Braves and then, after a June 1968 trade, with Cincinnati. He was pretty much one of those good-fielding, weak-hitting guys who used to regularly play the positions between first and third for most Major League clubs back then. His lifetime batting average was .236 and he hit just a single home run during his playing days, a two-run shot off his ex-Atlanta teammate, Ron Reed, while he was playing for the Reds in 1970. As it turned out, that home run would not be the biggest shock of his career. That happened in 1971, during a game in LA against the Dodgers, when a 10 pound bag of flour dropped out of the sky and landed just a few feet away from where Woodward was standing at shortstop.

After hanging up his spikes, Woodward eventually became head coach of Florida State, where he oversaw four very successful seasons of Seminole baseball. He then accepted the assistant GM position with the Reds in 1981 and in 1985, George Steinbrenner hired him to serve as an assistant to then Yankee GM, Clyde King. Those were the days Steinbrenner was firing his GMs more frequently than the Kardashian girls use a mirror. In 1987, it became Woodward’s turn to take the job. He lasted in it for about a year. During his tenure, Lou Piniella was the Yankee field manager and he’d often meet with Woodward to discuss the team’s personnel needs. One day, Sweet Lou asked Woody if George Steinbrenner was as rough on Yankee GMs as he was on his managers. In response, Woodward opened his desk drawer to show Piniella it was filled with prescription drugs and antacids. There were probably times during his days working for “the Boss” that old Woody wished that bag of flour that fell from the heavens sixteen years earlier had hit him square in the head.

During his single year in the job, his trades brought Rick Rhoden, Pat Clements, Cecilio Guante, Ron Romanick, Alan Mills, Randy Velarde, Mark Slas and Bill Gullickson to the Bronx and his most notable draft choice was the outfielder, Gerald Williams. Steinbrenner then replaced him with Lou Piniella and a few years later, Woodward became GM of the Mariners, where he traded for Randy Johnson, drafted Alex Rodriguez, Brett Boone, and Raul Ibanez, hired his buddy Lou Piniella as manager and made Seattle one of the better teams in baseball. He still works for the Mariner organization as a part time scout.

Cedric Tallis became George Steinbrenner’s GM, right after the Yankees won their first World Series for the shipbuilder’s son in 1977. That was right after Gabe Paul, who Tallis succeeded as GM, was getting most of the credit in the media for building that championship team and right after the Boss got sick and tired of seeing Paul get all that credit. By 1977, Steinbrenner was pretty much convinced he was a baseball genius and that he only needed a GM to carry out his orders. Paul had too big of an ego to hold the title in name only, so the Yankee owner replaced him.

Tallis was actually a highly experienced and capable baseball executive who had spent twenty years running minor league franchises. He became business manager of the American League’s newly formed Los Angeles Angels in 1961 and seven years later was hired as the first GM of the new Kansas City Royal franchise. It was Tallis who started the famous Kansas City Royal Baseball Academy with its mission of converting great athletes with no baseball experience into Major League baseball players. His astute draft management and clever trades helped the Royals finish with 85 wins in just their third season and earned Tallis the Sporting News Executive of the Year Award in 1971.

Three years later he was hired by the Yankees to oversee the reconstruction of the original Yankee Stadium. When that project was completed he became Paul’s assistant. He was Steinbrenner’s GM during the 1978 and ’79 seasons. He’s the guy “the Boss” sent to fire Bob Lemon in 1978, after Lemon’s pal and former Cleveland Indian teammate, Yankee president Al Rosen refused to do so. He’s also the Yankee GM who signed free agents Goose Gossage and Tommy John.

Tallis’s tenure in the job did not survive the tumultuous and tragic 1979 season. Gossage’s thumb injury followed by Thurman Munson’s tragic death doomed the Yankees’ chances for a three-peat. Steinbrenner decided he wanted Gene Michael to be his team’s new GM so he kicked Tallis upstairs, where he remained employed by New York for three more years.

His next job was as executive director of an organization known as the Tampa Baseball Group, which was formed to lure a baseball team to the central Florida city. He died of a heart attack in 1991. He was 76-years-old.

After winning a Purple Heart in WWII during the invasion of Italy, Bill Bergesch returned home, used the GI Bill to to get his business degree and began a long career as a baseball executive by accepting a job in the St. Louis Cardinals’ minor league organization. Ten years later he made his indelible contribution to that franchise when he became the guy who signed the great pitcher, Bob Gibson.

He was promoted to Cardinal’s scouting coordinator in 1959 and then was hired by the Kansas City A’s as an assistant GM, where he worked for the franchise’s new, slightly off-kilter owner, Charley Finley. He was hired by the Mets the following year to help that brand new franchise create its minor league organization from scratch and in 1964, was hired by the Yankees to serve as the team’s traveling secretary and manager of Yankee Stadium. He then changed sports, accepting front office positions with two Big Apple soccer teams. It was as GM of the New York Cosmos that Bergesch signed Brazilian superstar Pele out of retirement.

He then changed professions and industries, leaving sports and going to work for the next decade as a venture capitalist. By then, George Steinbrenner had taken over the Yankees and hired Bergesch as the team’s scouting director in 1978 and then promoted him to vice president of baseball operations a couple of years later. This was right during the time that “the Boss” was in his most tyrannical state as owner of the Yankees. In fact, Steinbrenner decided that he could be his own general manager, so he pointedly refused to give Bergesch that title. As it turned out, perhaps “hatchet man” would have been an even better one.

Regardless if it was devastating young Yankee prospects like Dave Righetti by unexpectedly demoting them back to the minors, firing Bob Lemon or Yogi Berra as skippers even though they each had been promised full years in the job or reminding established veterans like Tommy John that they were being paid too much money to have a bad outing, it was Bergesch who would be sent to deliver the ill-timed news from George. In fact, I remember thinking that Bergesch had as tough and thankless a job as Richard Nixon’s chief-of-staff did after the Watergate break in was discovered.

Before too long, Bergesch had carried out so many unpleasant Steinbrenner-directed edicts that he became a very unpopular guy in the Yankee clubhouse. The problem was that even though he was doing what George told him to do, the Boss would blame the poor guy whenever any of the things he did back fired or caused negative press, which happened about three times a week back then. It was the ultimate no-win situation.

The irony was that Bergesch genuinely liked Steinbrenner and enjoyed their friendship. He cited this as the reason why he had decided to leave the Yankees in 1984. He told the press he needed to go in a different direction. Unfortunately for Bergesch, that direction turned out to be working for the one owner in baseball who was capable of acting even more irrationally than Steinbrenner did at the time. Bergesch became the GM of Marge Schott’s Cincinnati Reds.

Not only did Bergesch value his friendship with the Boss, the feeling was mutual and when Steinbrenner entered a much more rational period of his tenure as Yankee owner in the early nineties, he brought Bergesch back to serve as Gene Michael’s assistant in 1990. The grateful executive would remain part of the Yankee family and good friends with George for the rest of their days. Bergesch passed away in 2011 at the age of 89.

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